Solar panel installer and financier SolarCity might have slipped past its plan goal to go public on Wednesday morning, but in a new filing, the company says it is now planning to sell more shares and is asking for $ 8 per share, significantly lower than its initial range of $ 13 to $ 15 per share.
SolarCity says it plans to sell 11.5 million shares — 65,000 of those shares will be sold by existing stockholders. Co-founder, and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk still says in the filing he plans to buy $ 15 million worth of shares. In addition, SolarCity says investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson plans to buy 1.5 million shares in the offering, and the DBL Equity Fund (DBL is an investor) plans to buy 300,000 shares in the offering.
Originally SolarCity was planning on selling 10.1 million shares. At $ 8 per share, SolarCity would raise $ 92 million, less than its original plan to raise $ 141 million (at the previous midpoint of its range). At $ 8 per share SolarCity would also be valued at $ 585 million, points out Reuters, a little more than half of its original $ 1 billion valuation.
Wall Street still seems skittish around solar stocks, despite that SolarCity is quite different from a solar manufacturer like Solyndra or First Solar, as well as a solar plant developer like BrightSource. SolarCity finances and installs solar panels on rooftops, so it’s been able to take advantage of the super cheap solar panels in the market.
However, SolarCity is facing headwinds in a few areas: it needs to maintain its access to low cost capital to fund its solar roofs, it has rising losses along with its rising revenues, and it has a few unusual things in its filing (see number 3 in 5 things to know about SolarCity’s IPO, and it’s not all good.) SolarCity is seen as a bellwether for clean energy exits and stocks.
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